AMD released a dual processor chipset for their Duron/Athlon a bit over a month ago (the AMD 760MP). Currently there is only one motherboard out there using this chipset, and it's a rather expensive board with on-board SCSI, LAN, etc. (the Tyan Thunder K7).
August hopefully will bring the first reasonably priced dual-Athlon boards to market, with Tyan and MSI both planning lower-cost dual boards. Just when exactly they'll arrive though or at what price, no one quite knows yet.
As for the processors, all Athlons and Durons are, in theory, dual capable, but the only ones tested and guarunteed for dual-processor operation are the new AthlonMP processors, which sell for a fair bit more then the regular Athlons. That being said, I don't think anyone's run into a Duron or Athlon that didn't work in a properly configured dual setup.
Hypertransport is a point to point communication protocol for connecting chips, nothing more and nothing less. It's not intended as a PCI replacement as it is no a bus. Replacing AGP with Hypertransport is an option, though I haven't heard anyone proposing that.
As for how AMD is planning on using it, first off it will be used for connecting north and south bridges together. nVidia's new nForce chipset for the AMD Athlon (expected in shipping products in August or there-abouts) already makes use of Hypertransport for this. The next step is the really important one though. AMD's Hammer series of processors, scheduled for release this time next year, will make use of hypertransport for communicating with external chipsets. This will not be quite like EV6 in the Athlon and Alpha now, mainly because the Hammer chips will have integrated memory controllers all on their own. Hypertransport will be used to talk to a sort of companion chip for all I/O other then memory stuff. Just how well it will work at this point is anybody's guess, though the integrated memory controller at least seems like a good idea and is likely the way that most CPUs will go eventually.
If you look at the system specs (on page 9 I believe), he used different video cards, different sound cards and different memory for the various systems! Hardly isolating the processor/motherboard! What's more, there's no mention of which chips are running in-spec and which are overclocked (the Celeron 550 is obviously an overclocked chip since no Celeron 550 exists, but what about the other ones?). And what's all the big deal about the power consumption? Sure, 41W is too high for the mobile market, but it's not as high as the power consumption of many of Intel's PII and PIII chips, it's certainly lower then nearly all of AMD's other Athlons, and it doesn't come close to touching the 100W+ power consumption of some Compaq Alphas! Sharky also has some kinda weird numbers in his benchmarks, ie the Quake ones, where the Celeron 500 (with the older core and no SSE) scores higher then the Celeron 600 (with the improved core and SSE instructions). There were even a few things that were just flat out incorrect (ie the cache associativity of the new Celerons is only 4-way, not 8-way as stated in the article).
Anyway, here are a few reviews that were somewhat better:
Slashdot Mirror
AMD released a dual processor chipset for their Duron/Athlon a bit over a month ago (the AMD 760MP). Currently there is only one motherboard out there using this chipset, and it's a rather expensive board with on-board SCSI, LAN, etc. (the Tyan Thunder K7).
August hopefully will bring the first reasonably priced dual-Athlon boards to market, with Tyan and MSI both planning lower-cost dual boards. Just when exactly they'll arrive though or at what price, no one quite knows yet.
As for the processors, all Athlons and Durons are, in theory, dual capable, but the only ones tested and guarunteed for dual-processor operation are the new AthlonMP processors, which sell for a fair bit more then the regular Athlons. That being said, I don't think anyone's run into a Duron or Athlon that didn't work in a properly configured dual setup.
Hypertransport is a point to point communication protocol for connecting chips, nothing more and nothing less. It's not intended as a PCI replacement as it is no a bus. Replacing AGP with Hypertransport is an option, though I haven't heard anyone proposing that.
As for how AMD is planning on using it, first off it will be used for connecting north and south bridges together. nVidia's new nForce chipset for the AMD Athlon (expected in shipping products in August or there-abouts) already makes use of Hypertransport for this. The next step is the really important one though. AMD's Hammer series of processors, scheduled for release this time next year, will make use of hypertransport for communicating with external chipsets. This will not be quite like EV6 in the Athlon and Alpha now, mainly because the Hammer chips will have integrated memory controllers all on their own. Hypertransport will be used to talk to a sort of companion chip for all I/O other then memory stuff. Just how well it will work at this point is anybody's guess, though the integrated memory controller at least seems like a good idea and is likely the way that most CPUs will go eventually.
I just read the review of the Duron at Sharkyextreme, and I have to say, it was really poorly done! Here's a link to it:
p u/duron_700/
i cle_id=5000159
http://www.sharkyextreme.com/hardware/reviews/c
If you look at the system specs (on page 9 I believe), he used different video cards, different sound cards and different memory for the various systems! Hardly isolating the processor/motherboard! What's more, there's no mention of which chips are running in-spec and which are overclocked (the Celeron 550 is obviously an overclocked chip since no Celeron 550 exists, but what about the other ones?). And what's all the big deal about the power consumption? Sure, 41W is too high for the mobile market, but it's not as high as the power consumption of many of Intel's PII and PIII chips, it's certainly lower then nearly all of AMD's other Athlons, and it doesn't come close to touching the 100W+ power consumption of some Compaq Alphas! Sharky also has some kinda weird numbers in his benchmarks, ie the Quake ones, where the Celeron 500 (with the older core and no SSE) scores higher then the Celeron 600 (with the improved core and SSE instructions). There were even a few things that were just flat out incorrect (ie the cache associativity of the new Celerons is only 4-way, not 8-way as stated in the article).
Anyway, here are a few reviews that were somewhat better:
http://www.aceshardware.com/Spades/read.php?art
http://www.anandtech.com/showdoc.html?i=1261